Assumption of Mary

The Assumption of Mary — in which the Virgin is carried bodily into heaven after her death, surrounded by angels and apostles — was among the most ambitious compositional challenges in Baroque religious painting, requiring the painter to orchestrate a large cast of figures across two distinct zones: the earthly scene below and the heavenly vision above. Vaccaro's treatment from around 1650 confronted him with a subject that had been defined by Titian's monumental Frari altarpiece and Correggio's Parma dome, and which was central to Marian devotion intensified by the Council of Trent. For a Neapolitan painter working in the tradition of Ribera, the subject's requirement for luminous heavenly light and airborne figures represented a welcome departure from the earthbound tenebrism of most Caravaggist subjects. Vaccaro's approach likely balances the Bolognese tradition of sweet, aureate celestial light with the more physical, weight-bearing tradition of the Naples school.

An Assumption composition requires two contrasting lighting schemes — the darker, earthly lower zone with the empty tomb and grieving apostles, and the radiant upper zone where the Virgin ascends among cloud-borne angels. Vaccaro handles the transition between these zones through a gradual lightening of the palette and increasingly loose, gestural brushwork in the heavenly passage.